Over the past twenty years, palaeoenvironmental research in the Mediterranean has progressed significantly, based mainly on marine, lake, marsh, peat bog and fluvial archives. These records demonstrate a long-standing anthropogenic impact on the Mediterranean ecosystems but also provide evidence of significant climatic instability (e.g. Magny et al. 2013; Vannière et al. 2013) with notable periods of Rapid Climatic Change (RCC) observed on the global scale during the Holocene (9.2, 8.2, 6-5, 4.2, 3.2 ka cal. BP; c. 7.2, 6.2, 4-3, 2.2, 1.2 ka BC). In polar records, RCCs that start abruptly within a decade or two at the most and most often concern a period of 150 to 400 years, are often considered among the main environmental factors causing socio-economic and cultural changes, migrations, and even collapses. According to such climatic determinism, an RCC would be much harder (if not impossible), for a human society to adapt to, thus leading to radical societal transformations (e.g.Weiss et al. 1993; DeMenocal, 2001; Drake, 2012;Weninger et al. 2014) but an increasing number of published studies suggest that therelationship between environmental and cultural changes is more complex and offer a range of non-deterministic explanations (e.g. Butzer, 2012). Starting from this perspective, we have developed a new research project (ArcheoMed- Paleomex) in the framework of the MISTRAls initiative to respond to the following questions:1) What is a natural forcing (timing, nature, origin)?2) How can a so-called “climate event” produce a social fact: change in materialproduction, resource exploitation, settlement pattern, etc.?